Pop star Kimbra calls out music men who held “a gun to my head” on A Reckoning album

More than a decade after she soared to stardom with Gotye on the viral track Somebody That I Used To Know, Kimbra is breaking free of the music industry machine.

It has been 12 years since the Grammy-winning Somebody That I Used To Know catapulted Kimbra to global pop stardom with the song’s creator, Australian music maverick Gotye.

As that innovative single and its groundbreaking video went its viral way around the world, the New Zealand artist also released her debut album Vows, which confirmed her unique talent for quirky pop and reached the upper echelons of the Australian and American charts.

Even with an audience of millions who have followed her career closely since then, she feels slightly terrified ahead of releasing her powerful fourth record A Reckoning which signals a new chapter in a career she began when she was just 15 and wrote her debut single Settle Down.

Kimbra split with her label and hired a new team for her next music chapter. Picture: Supplied.

In the past 18 months, she broke up with her longtime record label after they reached an impasse, changed managers and wrote songs fuelled by anger and anxiety about the past and the future.

“It was a really scary time in my life because (Warner) wanted to extend my album deal from six albums to a f … ing eight-album deal and choose the producers and I just couldn’t let them do that. We were moving in different directions and it was clear we couldn’t keep working together,” she says during a recent Australian visit.

Starting from scratch as an independent artist with a new team is equal parts liberating and petrifying.

There are the huge financial risks, like having to bankroll video shoots in Iceland and a wardrobe of couture costumes.

New Zealand pop artist Kimbra releases new album A Reckoning. Picture: Supplied.

“Yeah, it wasn’t really the empowering ‘F … you!’ to the man move,” she says, laughing.

“I took some big leaps of faith, and self-financing all of your work is really stressful, you know? You’ve seen how expensive the music videos look, and they are (expensive).”

When Kimbra first started playing her new songs to friends, they all remarked they “sound like an artist that’s being freed from their record label.”

There are certainly no filters or ambiguity. The album opens with the brutally candid track Save Me, a song written in 2020 as she wrestled with her mental health.

“A therapist at the time said to me, ‘Why don’t you write a song that no one’s ever going to hear?’ and Save Me was that song,” Kimbra says.

“So I could say (in the lyrics) that I lack the courage to take care of myself, I’m sinking and I’m scared it’s going to drown my confidence.

“It’s great challenge for every songwriter to do that.”

Emboldened by her creative freedom and charged with anger and a desire to make the music industry executives who had tried to bend her to their will accountable for their actions, she wrote Gun.

“Gun is definitely targeted towards men in the music industry that have used words in a contract to ‘free’ me, and then they’ve become a gun to my head and trapped me. I’m not really scared anymore and someone needs to say this stuff, right?” she says.

The record’s next single before its release this week is Foolish Thinking, a dedication to the daughter she may have and the mother she hopes to be in the future.

She says she has been contemplating the idea of motherhood as a creative and philosophical concept ever since she wrote Settle Down as a teenager.

“I really like the idea of prophetic songwriting, writing something I will need to hear, or my daughter may need to hear, in the future, because the lyrics are more geared to a teenager,” she says.

“Foolish Thinking is this admission that as much as I’m going to think I’m ready and that I’ll have the blueprint on morality, what to teach them about what’s right and wrong, the truth is I definitely don’t know and definitely won’t know by then.

“There’s a line in there that kind of breaks my heart and says ‘Everybody’s saying that you look old enough,’ and I remember thinking ‘Oh God, what’s it going to be like to realise men will be looking at her?’ and I’m just going to have to let go of that.”

As well as writing and recording, Kimbra also made a podcast called Playing With Fire featuring intimate conversations about mental health, how they work and “transcendence” with other creatives including British musical prodigy Jacob Collier.

She said the series gave her tools to manage her depression and anxiety, from phone notes mantras to making sure she checks in with her therapist before a jam-packed schedule of interviews which she finds can be both stimulating and draining.

“It’s especially challenging doing interviews because you’re encountering ideas that people have about you; there’s a fantasy to the work that I do, and I feel a pressure to uphold the image and expectation people have of Kimbra,” she says.

“And then some days, I don’t feel like that at all.”

A Reckoning by Kimbra is out on January 27.